Mogwai - George Square Thatcher Death Party_________________A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

But since capital is a relation between itself and its opposite, labor (or the revolutionary subject or whatever you’d like to say), it’s never totally clear whose voice is speaking in any given instance. Is it capital who’s saying, “This is our time”? Is it labor who’s singing, “Till the world ends”? It’s interesting also that this last line comes from Britney’s latest single, because the two contenders for her position as most profitable female pop singer, Gaga and Ke$ha, occupy the two voices, the one of capital singing to its opposite and the one of that opposite singing to capital. But in a bonus trick, what is sung is a sort of liar’s paradox. Neither can really say which one it is, because as dialectical poles, each voice depends on the other for its own identity. So we get Gaga saying more or less, “I’m not capital. Capital is a liar.”

L: And Ke$ha says “I am capital. Capital is a liar.” To search the underground for an earnest revolutionary soundtrack as people have before can’t possibly work now. Marketers rely on us to find something that hasn’t been sold yet so they can buy it. Capital is ahead of us at the moment, and if you spend a little time at Zuccotti Park it becomes clear that a lot of the occupiers are still parroting Christina Aguilera’s dreadlocked “You are beautiful/ In every single way.” But the content of popular music, what’s edgy enough to really capture public attention, has changed a lot since Christina topped the charts. Sorry Bob Dylan, you can’t compete with the Biebs.

So of course I am now listening to this._________________A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? ~Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray